Austria Tourism to Run a Digital Ad Campaign Powered by Blockchain

The Austrian National Tourist Office (ANTO) is working on a blockchain pilot project that serves digital ad campaigns. The tourism department is partnering with Adbank, an ad platform based on Ethereum to run a digital ad campaign based on blockchain technology. The campaign will be run with the help of Adbank’s native ADB token, designed with the ERC20 protocol.

What Is the New Project All About?

The project is designed to help reduce fraud, which costs advertisers $51 million per day in 2018. The program will help to reduce fees charged by ad tech middlemen, some of whom are reportedly marking up the costs by up to 70 percent or more. Red Bull Media House will provide an inventory on the publishing side via Bergwelten – the alpine lifestyle publication – for the blockchain ad campaign. Adbank cofounders Kelsey Cole and Angelo Dodaro met the Red Bull team at their Salzburg headquarters in April this year to collaborate on the project.

Dodaro later commented:

“It’s exciting to see a country like Austria acknowledging the powerful use case that exists for advertising on the blockchain. This level of transparency between advertiser and publisher is unprecedented, especially for an organization like ANTO.”

He further noted that advertisers would see where their money is going for the first time. Data does not go into a “black box,” where it becomes questionable.

Why Are Digital Ad Networks a Problem?

Studies show that programmatic digital ad networks are consuming 48 cents of every advertising dollar. The figure is achieved before accounting for ad fraud, which reportedly accounts for 56 percent of website traffic. Such fraud is conducted by bots and non-human traffic, which eventually cost advertisers. Blockchain technology can help remove this type of fraud and make website traffic more valuable and accountable.

ANTO’s head of brand management, Michael Scheuch, said that Austria is being pitched as one of the premier global destinations for tourism throughout the year. He added:

“In the pilot with Adbank, one of the more interesting blockchain applications in the advertising sector, we hope to overcome on a global scale various difficulties within classic online advertising.”

Adbank’s blockchain-based payment protocol was completed in March, which works on a patent-pending antifraud artificial intelligence system.

Austria Tourism to Run a Digital Ad Campaign Powered by Blockchain was originally found on [blokt] – Blockchain, Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.